I left school with four guys i considered my best friends, and two of them are dead.
One was hit by a car while crossing the road. It was never really clear exactly what happened, but he was leaving a bar after an afternoon of drinking, and there’s a good chance that he wandered out without looking. He was 20 at the time.
The other friend was killed in 2002 in the terrorist bombing in Kuta, Bali. He was 33. While he was one of my best friends when we left school, we had grown apart and hadn’t seen each other for a few years when he was killed.
I have two.
One rainy morning in 6th Grade, a classmate who was a friend told me about a “cave” he and his neighbor had been digging into a hillside behind their houses. (I assume it was probably a “larger than might have been expected” burrow.) Their plan was to put in 2x4 braces to support the walls because of all the rain. We were eleven, not nearly smart enough to see the error of his thinking. He lived one block behind, two blocks down from me.
Sure enough, shortly after dark we start hearing sirens, and when we saw cop cars and firetrucks heading toward Philip’s house, I instantly realized what must have happened. Phil and his friend were several feet into the burrow when the earth collapsed on them. They probably didn’t suffer long, as the ground in our area tended to turn into sticky thick mud when soaked. The weight of the earth would have suffocated them quickly. But they’d been buried for hours before anyone missed them. It took the rescuers a couple of hours (in pouring rain) to dig them out.
The other one is from High School. Alan was someone I knew but didn’t particularly like. Our circles overlapped at times, but for the most part we had little if any interaction, which was probably as fine with him as it was with me.
A couple of years ago I saw his obituary in the paper, and was shocked to learn what had happened to him. About three years out of High School, he had a “diving accident” (no details were offered), and spent the next 43 years in a wheelchair with very limited use of his arms and nothing below that. His death was caused by complications resulting from the decades-old injury.
Andy, a friend of mine in middle school fell of a jet ski into the water and another jet ski ran him over, killing him.
A friend Brandon died shortly after high school crossing the street while drunk. Hit by a car.
Just last week I learned by Dad’s neighbor’s daughter, a girl I was acquaintances with since she was 5 and I was 10, just died of a brain hemorrhage at 28 years old.
One other I can think of may be sadder because of the lost potential since he was a pre-med student. I can’t even remember his name now, and I don’t think I ever said two words to him, but he was a classmate, a pre-med student who was in the first-year German class I was taking in college. He always sat in the back and was invariably late or just barely on time and would always rush past me to get to his seat.
One day not too far into the semester, I read his name in the newspaper. He’d been killed the night before in a motorcycle accident. So naturally he wasn’t in class anymore, but the teacher didn’t know what happened to him. After two or three classes, when she was checking to see who was present, she said something like, “Where is Herr Such-and-Such? He never comes to class anymore!” “Um, well, Teach …” I said as I broke the news to her.
A college classmate and good friend insisted on marrying a very unsuitable guy. She was the daughter of a senior civil servant and her husband worked in a hotel kitchen. This was Pakistan in the 1980s. This sort of thing was just not done. Her father died, and she went off and married the guy.
She was not allowed to leave the house or have contact with any of her old friends, male or female, soon after he started beating her. Had four children in four years, all girls. She is supposed to have committed suicide by jumping off the roof. Don’t know if I believe it.
Stabbed to death in a fight with his junkie neighbour in his early 30s.
To be fair, I’d probably have nominated him “Most likely to be stabbed to death in a fight with a junkie” if that had been a category to vote on in high school.
My former next door neighbor (my age and classmate in elementary school) kicked a man to death when he was 24 and it got pleaded down to aggravated battery and only 3 yrs of jail time.
Looking back on it, he had the profile of soon to be serial killer. He liked to trim the whiskers of dogs and cats.
This was 30 years ago, and I don’t know what has happened to him since that time.
Oddly, this incident happened in a town about 1400 miles from where we went to elementary school. And my father now lives in that town.
A few students in my high school died in car crashes; of those who graduated one died of natural causes about 10 years ago and another–I guess he didn’t graduate–shot himself at age 18 after breaking up with his girlfriend.
One of my father’s classmates (c. 1953) decided school was for patsies and became a drug dealer. According to my father, he was good at it and soon had a nice house and a fancy car. Trouble was, he forgot to pay his suppliers and they came looking for him. He jumped in his fancy car and tore off down the highway with them on his tail; after a massive shootout on the Interstate he was no more.
The kid who sat next to me in high school physics died mid-semester in a light plane crash.
In junior high I hung out every lunch with two guys, one wild and one straight-laced. In high school one of them was driving and hit a curve and killed the other…unexpectedly, it was the straight-laced kid driving, drunk supposedly for the first time.
A nice girl in my junior high history class shot herself in the stomach with a rifle and died a day later.
A kid in my study hall crashed his car on prom night and killed himself and two other kids who I didn’t know.
Interestingly, in retrospect I don’t recall any comments from teachers or grief counseling.
Sure: G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten, so they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan.
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head, and Bobby OD’d on Drano on the night that he was wed…
Umm wait…
All I can think of is a guy who was, I think, a year younger and eventually became a cop or at least tried to get into some sort of LE career. A few months ago people mentioned his death on Facebook. Suicide, which might’ve been apparent due to dancing around the cause.
I guess Dustin the Wind “wins” the thread by most metrics.
Because I don’t think a single court in the US or Canada would consider that first degree murder. There is no planning component. You may legitimately argue that the charge was too lenient (IANAL but probably voluntary manslaughter due to provocation or else second degree).
My husband’s high school best friend died after being pushed in front of a NYC subway train by a mental patient the summer after they graduated from high school. It’s a very tragic story. The friend was a fellow student at New York city’s famous Stuyvesant high school. He was on his way on full scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Back in the 60s, a close college friend of mine got heavily involved in drugs, first as a user, then as a dealer. She’d been a brilliant Philosophy & Math major and a gifted lecturer. She wound up getting arrested, skipping bail, changing her identity, and disappearing underground. Her using had gotten out of control, and I guess she finally died of a drug overdose. What an incredible waste of a beautiful human being.
I was checking social media for an answer to the OP. A friend has a bad haircut.
On the other hand our headmaster was murdered, in a rent boy’s flat, when I was in high school (a boys’ only school :eek:). That story was in a national newspaper.
He was in the class behind me, but my neighbor was driving a UPS truck and some kid was target shooting with a rifle. One shot ricocheted off a rock and found its way into my neighbor’s brain. The truck crashed of course and he was rushed to the hospital where he died shortly thereafter.
